21st Century Learning - Let's Leave 20th Century Education Behind! I'd like to restate something I've learned over the years living through and participating in the latest significant historical, world-changing event: The Internet.

Who better than Visual.ly to share 7 online tools that will help you create visual, be they simple images, infographics or a mind map. This post shares the following tools:

* Canva - a free tool

* Pixlr - a free tool

* PicMonkey - a free tool, but you may pay for additional tools

* Quozio - free tool

* Share As Image - a free tool, but will show a watermark; pay for no watermark

* Skitch - free through Evernote

* Coggle - free tool that allows you to create mind maps

Visuals are a key part of learning. These seven tools provide a range of options that you may want to use when designing materials for your classes (or perhaps students would find use for them in your class).

As your role grows in scale and influence, so too must your ability to listen. But listening is one of the toughest skills to master — and requires uncovering deeper barriers within oneself.

While tactically there are many ways to strengthen your listening skills, you must focus on the deeper, internal issues at stake to really improve. Listening is a skill that enables you to align people, decisions, and agendas. You cannot have leadership presence without hearing what others have to say.

In this talk, Sugata Mitra will take us through the origins of schooling as we know it, to the dematerialisation of institutions as we know them. Thirteen years of experiments in children's education takes us through a series of startling results – children can self-organise their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, they can read by themselves. Finally, the most startling of them all: groups of children with access to the internet can learn anything by themselves. From the slums of India, to the villages of India and Cambodia, to poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the USA and Italy, to the schools of Gateshead and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong, Sugata's experimental results show a strange new future for learning.

Looking for ways to bring experts into the classroom? Ask the librarian! There are tons of great resources out there and people and places that would love to share with you, from veterans to scientists to authors. Invite the world in!

Most of these suggestions are fairly obvious, but this can help spur some thinking on the many ways to use this wonderful tool. Video conferencing brings the world to your classroom and the classroom to the world!

"Below we’ve gathered a diverse list of learning apps across iOS and Android from giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft, as well as upstarts like Brainfeed, The Sandbox, and Knowji. None of the apps are perfect, but each app does something special, and in that talent represents what’s possible as we careen towards 2020 and beyond.

Learning through play. Self-directed learning. Flipped learning. Mobile learning. Collaborative learning. Social learning. It’s all here. Alone, none offer the turn-key approach to education that textbooks have traditionally turned to. But this is a strength. As education technology grows, we can adapt to new learning models that take advantage of the fragmented but enormous potential of self-directed, creative, collaborative, and almost entirely mobile learning."

Last summer we told you that the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content Program by taking 4600 high-resolution images from the Getty collections, putting them into the public domain, and making them freely available in digital format. We also made it clear -- there would be more to come.

Getty has added an additional 77,000 images to their Open Content Program (which means they have made available over 87,000 images). This post, from Open Culture, provides additional information or you may want to head directly to The Getty and begin to search.

"I was recently contacted by a teacher who has just received a new iPad to use for the rest of the year before her students receive them in the fall. She was seeking recommendations for free spelling apps. Here are five that I pulled from my archives."

But here’s the thing: the history of social media actually goes back a lot further, and its roots can be found in blogging, Google, AOL, ICQ, the beginnings of the world wide web and, perhaps surprisingly, CompuServe.

Great presentation design can be difficult to master because it requires the coordination of many elements, including colors, fonts, images, icons and background. While there are a lot of pieces to the presentation design puzzle, don’t be overwhelmed.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.